A traffic light is the one sign on your street that tells a story. How to pick the moment, place the lights at a junction, and get them on a tile in seconds.

Printed tiles, a sticker sheet you cut out yourself, or genuine tiles that arrive with the stickers already on. Three ways to put detail on a build, and how to choose.

Most LEGO graffiti looks like a picture stuck to a brick. Real street art is the paint and the wall together. What we learned making our own street art sheet, and where graffiti belongs in a LEGO city: walls, shutters and trains.

Every LEGO city has a front and a back, and the back is where the character is. How to turn the gap between two modular buildings into an alleyway that looks lived in: doors with owners, shutters, bins and street art in the right places.

Most spaceship interiors stop at the pilot seat. The rest of the hull is where a ship stops looking like a box: the power wall, the life support bay, the caution panel by the hatch. Here is what goes where.

The walls are up and it still looks like a model. Three details that turn a modular building into a shop, and why the tile decides the sign.

You have built the hull, the engines look right, and then you open it up and the inside is bare studs and a chair.

Cockpit interiors are the part almost everyone leaves until last.

Here is what actually goes on the wall, and what real spacecraft taught us about arranging it.

Look closely at the edge of our runway and the yellow lines are broken. A real airfield does not do that, and neither did our first design. Then we built it, and found out why every solid line across separately placed tiles is a trap.

She is looking into the crystal ball. So is the owl. We still cannot decide which of them spotted something first, and that small doubt turns out to be the whole appeal of a seer’s tower.

A brick bakery reads as a bakery the moment you add bread. What makes people stop and look is the paperwork: the sign over the door, the prices in the window, the little artisan boast on the wall. Here is where each one goes.

Which LEGO road signs make a street feel real, where they go, and how to pick exactly the ones your build needs in a few seconds.

Every shop on our street has someone who runs it. The Daily Grind has two: Brenda Hart, who runs it with warmth and standards, and Chicho, the terrier who is fairly sure he runs it instead.

A shelf reads as stocked when the labels disagree with each other. How we drew 89 potion labels, drawer plates and curios for The Last Light Apothecary, and where to put them.

A MOC can be beautifully built and still feel empty. What fills it is rarely another brick: it is the printed, painted, lived-in detail. Here is the small stuff that turns a model into a place, whatever you are building.

Bunting and big builds are the easy part. It's the small printed details, menu boards, price cards, a chalk A-board, that make a brick-built café look real. Here are five, and the sheet that does the heavy lifting.